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SENATOR MC CAIN PLEASE STFU!

"No, wait, let me keep talking."
With conditions deteriorating in Iraq—because of the actions of Iraqi President Maliki and the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military and the Iraqi insurgents and the Iraqi religious factions—Republican Sen. John "Wannabe President" McCain, thwarted in his dream to have U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, is making the media rounds to blame it all on President Obama.

“The president wanted out and now we are paying a heavy price,” the Arizona Republican said on MSNBC. "We had it won," McCain said. The U.S. "had the conflict won thanks to the surge … We had a stable government."

The only people stupid enough to think we ever had this war "won" were the same ones who predicted we'd "absolutely" be greeted as liberators, who thought the war would be paid for by Iraqi oil, who thought the Sunnis and Shia would "get along," who declared the war would "be brief," and that of course Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Oh, wait, what was that Sen. McCain?

As soon as the news was reported that Gen. David Petraeus is succeeding soon-to-be-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the media narrative was set in stone: the super-general who won the war in Iraq with the so-called surge can now work his magic in another theater.It's hard to stop a locomotive meme—which is what the surge story has become. But the success of the surge in Iraq remains debatable to this day. Still, try injecting that point into media discussions of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet with Petraeus taking over the Afghanistan war, it's worth noting the other side of the surge tale. So as a public service, here are a few analyses that question the surge hype.From Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard:

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior "ethnic cleansing" that had separated the contending groups.The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded -- that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam's regime -- and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn't think that would begin happening this quickly. It's only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.Anyone who tells you that the Iraq war is over should be forced to memorize this paragraph from the Sunday edition of the Washington Post:As Apache helicopter gunships cruised above Baghdad's Fadhil neighborhood, former Sunni insurgents fought from rooftops and street corners against American and Iraqi forces, according to witnesses, the Iraqi military and police. At least 15 people were wounded in the gunfights, which lasted several hours. By nightfall, the street fighters had taken five Iraqi soldiers hostage.That is Iraq 2009. Does it sound peaceful to you? Does it seem like the political questions vexing Iraq have been solved?

I've held off on commenting on the situation in Iraq during this unsettled transitional period. The bombings in Baghdad (another big one today) strike as painful but irrelevant. On the plus side, al Qaeda in Iraq has suffered some good hits. On the negative, the political situation looks as unresolved as ever. The other day an Iraqi friend gloomily predicted to me that the question of the next government would remain open until September, and then, once it was solved and the Americans were out of the way, violence would begin to increase.My gut feeling is that Iraq is adrift, and that this slow centrifugal process ultimately will result in, at best, a loose confederation. In other words, not only do I think the glass is half empty, I am not sure how long the glass can take the strain of what it is holding.But the truth is that I don't know and neither does anyone else. But as Tom Friedman used to say every year, the next six months in Iraq could be decisive.

Former Democratic Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton told CNSNews.com that the surge in Iraq may have “temporarily” achieved its military purpose of reducing violence, but its political intention of promoting “reconciliation” has not been accomplished....“The purpose of the surge in Iraq was to reduce the violence, which it did, but it also had a political purpose and the political purpose was to encourage reconciliation, which has not happened,” Hamilton, current president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, told CNSNews.com.“So the military objective was achieved temporarily, we’ve had a resurgence of violence in recent days,” he added. “The political objective has not been achieved.”

The main reason the "surge" in Afghanistan is on is because the conventional wisdom tells us the "surge" in Iraq "worked."The problem is, the Iraq surge did not work. Yes, the U.S. military perfectly executed its share of the strategy -- the restoration of some semblance of calm to blood-gushing Mesopotamian society -- but that was only Step One. The end-goal of the surge strategy, Step Two was always out of U.S. control -- a fundamental flaw. Step Two was up to the Iraqis: namely, to take the opportunity afforded by U.S.- provided security (see Step One) to bring about both "national reconciliation" and, as the powers-that-were further promised, the emergence of a U.S. ally in the so-called war on terror.Step One worked. Step Two didn't. The surge, like an uncaught touchdown pass, was incomplete. The United States is now walking off the battlefield with virtually nothing to show for its blood, treasure, time and effort. In fact, another "success" like that could kill us.

Though the success of the surge is regarded in much of the media as an article of faith, it remains open to discussion and examination. Looking at Iraq these days, it's certainly arguable that Petraeus did not work a miracle there. And the mission he faces in Afghanistan is tougher. To achieve anything resembling victory in Afghanistan, he'll likely need far more success than the Iraq surge produced—in reality or myth.

By Terry Canaan
September 24, 2008
Last week wasn’t John McCain’s best week.
A market meltdown exposed the shortcomings of McCain’s ideology of deregulation and set him back on his heels. With 83 Wall Street lobbyists working on his campaign, McCain not only found himself in the position of being a Washington insider running against the Washington establishment, but as a Wall Street insider running against Wall Street. That didn’t work so well. It was a gaffe-filled week for McCain-Palin, with both the candidate and running mate scrambling to find some sort of footing in the new political landscape.
In fact, the week was so bad for McCain that conservative columnist George Will took him out to the woodshed on ABC’s This Week Sunday, telling the panel that he blew it on the economy.

“I suppose the McCain campaign’s hope is that when there’s a big crisis, people will go for age and experience,” George Will said. “The question is who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and unflustered. It wasn’t John McCain, who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence said let’s fire somebody and picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration.”

On the same show, Sam Donaldson wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with McCain’s head, asking if McCain wasn’t “getting his talking points confused” and saying that “I think the question of McCain’s age is back on the table.”
McCain made some foreign policy stumbles last week; confusing Spanish PM Zapatero with the Zappatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the Colombian FARC, for example. This didn’t get a lot of press, but enough to ding his claim to foreign policy expertise. We’ve already dealt with his fumbling on the economy, so that’s scuffed his experience argument — his experience consists of doing the kind of stuff that got us into this mess. Pretty much all McCain has left is the “right about Iraq” argument.
Of course, that argument ignores the fact that McCain was wrong about Iraq from the start, while Barack Obama opposed the invasion, but it seems to be working well enough for him. McCain’s argument here is that, as long as we screwed up and invaded a nation that proved to be no threat to us, we might as well go ahead and win. That this is just winning for the sake of winning is, apparently, beside the point. In McCain’s world, if you mistakenly pick a fight with someone and find out it’s the wrong guy while you’re pounding him stupid, you keep up your unjustified crime of assault and battery if you’re winning. This is what John McCain refers to as coming home “with victory and honor.” In John McCain’s world, mistakes with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands can only be rectified by killing even more.
So it is that John McCain continues to tell us “the surge worked!” Of course, if it had worked, you’d assume the war would be over and people would be coming home. But I guess you’d be assuming wrong. Back in January, John McCain and Joe Lieberman co-authored an op-ed with the title “The Surge Worked.” Subtlety isn’t the strong point of these two.

After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already “lost,” and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.

In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.

Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge. Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001. Thanks to the surge, the Sunni Arabs who once constituted the insurgency’s core of support in Iraq have been empowered to rise up against the suicide bombers and fanatics in their midst — prompting Osama bin Laden to call them “traitors.”

Woohoo! We’re just doing a bang-up job of beating the living hell out of the wrong guy. Yay for us. McCain, who claims credit for the idea, seems to believe that “send in more troops!” is a masterpiece of military strategy and not the most obvious thing in the freakin’ world. If you listen to McCain, Bush, and just about any random Republican, the surge is the greatest military strategy since the D-Day invasion of Normandy. That Lieberman’s and McCain’s argument relies on pure BS shouldn’t be lost on anyone — neither al Qaeda nor Iran was responsible for the largest share of violence in Iraq. The country was in a civil war. The violence was mostly Iraqi on Iraqi.
And a new study by the University of California shows that it wasn’t the surge that was so successful, but the civil war. What many suspected was the case turns out to be the case — violence in Iraq fell because a period of ethnic cleansing went so well that the cleansers ran out of people to attack.

Using free satellite imagery from the Department of Defense, researchers tracked electricity use in Iraq before, during, and after the surge took place. Electricity use (as measured by visible night-light) in Baghdad fell, notably in certain outlying neighborhoods where incidents of ethnic violence were documented by The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces in Iraq.

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time,” says Thomas Gillespie, one of the co-authors, in a press release. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.”

“By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left,” said John Agnew of UCLA. “Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning.”
I’d also add that the fact that the violence is down does not equate peace. Iraqis still suffer an unacceptable level of violence and the fact that the violence was once worse doesn’t mean a whole helluva lot to people still having to deal with it on a daily basis. In fact, Iraq is so violent that the middle east still suffers from a massive refugee crisis, as people chased from their homes are too afraid to return. Yet Republicans would have you believe that Iraq is all sunshine, rainbows, and group hugs. “Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq,” President Bush told us, while neglecting to tell us that everyone else was as well — on the run from racist killers and religiously intolerant psychopaths.
So, add McCain’s “the surge worked!” triumphalism to the list of failures he chooses to showcase. The surge didn’t actually accomplish anything — in fact, despite the constant assurances that the surge is over, there are still more troops in Iraq than there were before the escalation. The escalation is ongoing — making the word “surge” an abuse of language.
Every time McCain talks about this “surge,” remember what really happened. Remember the dark and empty neighborhoods, cleared of the hated minorities and ungodly heathens. Remember the fact that one in five Iraqis is a refugee, chased out of their homes and still afraid to return. Remember that “the surge worked!” really means “ethnic cleansing was successful!” when translated from propaganda-speak into English. When McCain and the Republicans celebrate the success of their escalation, remember that what they’re really doing is proposing a toast to hatred, intolerance, and violence in the name of religion — none of which would’ve happened if we didn’t invade in the first place.
Whether you’re willing to drink to that depends entirely upon how much reality you’re willing to ignore.

Watch: Sen. Barack Obama says that Sen. John McCain was 'wrong' in supporting the war in Iraq. The Statement:
At a debate Friday, Sept. 26, in Oxford, Mississippi, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain attacked Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama's stance on the "surge" of troops in Iraq. "Senator Obama said the surge could not work, said it would increase sectarian violence, said it was doomed to failure," McCain said. "Recently on a television program, he said it exceeded our wildest expectations."Get the facts!The Facts
In a January 10, 2007, speech, President Bush announced plans to increase the number of troops in Iraq by about 20,000 in an effort to quell violence throughout the country and especially in Baghdad. By spring 2008, as the number of deaths and other violence in Iraq began to drop, Bush and other supporters - including McCain - were hailing the "surge" as a success and giving it much of the credit for the improvements.
In Congress, Obama was one of many lawmakers who spoke against the plan. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse," he said in a response to Bush's speech. On at least some occasions, Obama - who has campaigned on a promise to end the war in Iraq - said he wasn't questioning the ability of U.S. troops, but the long-term political impact the surge would have.
"Even those who support the escalation have acknowledged that 20,000, 30,000, even 40,000 more troops placed temporarily in places like Baghdad are not going to make a long-term difference," he said in a March 19, 2007, interview on CNN's "Larry King Live."
In a September 4 interview this year, Obama said the military surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," but that goals laid out by Bush, including turning over control of all Iraqi provinces to that nation's security forces, have not been achieved. "There's an underlying problem with what we've done," Obama said. "We have reduced the violence, but the Iraqis still haven't taken responsibility."The Verdict: True, but incomplete. While acknowledging the surge's military success, Obama says the political goals it was meant to secure have not been met.

“The surge worked.” So insistently do the media’s mainstream and conservative commentators repeat the Iraq success meme — echoing the mantra of George W. Bush and John McCain — that to probe its premises and assumptions is not permitted. To question the success of last year’s troop escalation supposedly implies a negative assessment of the performance of American soldiers and Marines and may even imperil their morale, creating a frame that stifles dissent. But now McCain himself has inadvertently reopened real debate on the subject by claiming that strategies and tactics used to quell the Sunni insurgency long before the surge troops arrived in Iraq should nevertheless be attributed to the surge. Indeed, the surge is so brilliant and so powerful, according to McCain, that it makes things happen in the past as well as in the present and the future. That must be what passes for “maverick” thinking, although there are certainly other names for it. For those of us who remain tethered to reality, however, the success of the surge must be measured in a context that accounts for many other factors — as must the simple assertion that we are winning the war in Iraq as a result of the escalation. The rebuttals of McCain’s embarrassing assertion that the Sunni insurgency’s turn toward the U.S. and away from al-Qaida came because of the surge have been ample and devastating. His badly skewed sense of time and events has raised fresh doubts about his fitness for the presidency, since he was either incapable of comprehending contemporary facts or intentionally misleading the public when he told CBS anchor Katie Couric that the Anbar awakening “began” during the surge (and that troop escalation enabled the U.S. to protect a Sunni sheik who was actually assassinated during that period). But aside from that moment of untruth, there are deeper problems in all the airy assertions about the triumph of the surge. First there is the matter of that shift by the Sunni insurgents, which had nothing to do with the escalation. What changed the minds of the Sunni rebels in Anbar province and elsewhere was a revamped counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasized careful bribery over indiscriminate reprisals — and that seized upon the growing alienation of the Sunnis from the bullying, murderous leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq. The American military officers who oversaw and implemented that strategy, including Gen. David Petraeus, deserve full credit. Even Petraeus, a strong supporter of the surge, makes very limited claims about its role in bolstering the Sunni turn, however.

In fact, it was the prospect of an early U.S. withdrawal, not the surge, that prompted the Sunni insurgents to change sides, according to the American officers who worked with their leaders. A fascinating article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs by Georgetown professor Colin Kahl and retired Gen. William Odom quotes Marine Maj. Gen. John Allen, who ran the tribal engagement operations in Anbar during 2007, saying that the Democratic sweep in the 2006 midterm elections and the increasing demand for withdrawal by the American public “did not go unnoticed” among the province’s Sunni sheiks. “They talked about it all the time.” Allen also told Kahl that the Marines exploited those concerns by telling the sheiks: “We are leaving … We don’t know when we are leaving, but we don’t have much time, so you [the Anbaris] better get after this.” Kahl and Odom write that “the risk that U.S. forces would leave pushed the Sunnis to cut a deal to protect their interests while they still could.” They also quote Maj. Niel Smith, the operations officer at the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, and Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of U.S. forces in Ramadi during that crucial period, who wrote a long article on the Anbar awakening in the journal Military Review. “A growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias,” they recalled, “made these younger [tribal] leaders [who led the awakening] open to our overtures.”
There is no doubt that the surge has coincided with diminishing violence in Iraq, although kidnappings and bombings continue daily. As many critics have pointed out, surge proponents always compare the present period with the worst months of 2006 and 2007 — and the arrival of 30,000 troops is not necessarily why the killing has ebbed.
Perhaps the most plausible reason is that there are many fewer Iraqis to kill in the places where the worst violence occurred, because so many of them have abandoned their homes or left the country altogether. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that roughly 5 million Iraqis have fled, with nearly half of them now living in Syria, Jordan or other neighboring states. Others belong to the cohort known as the “internally displaced,” who have sought refuge from the militias “cleansing” Baghdad in either the northern or southern provinces. When there isn’t anybody left to kill, the murder statistics tend to improve.
Another fortunate coincidence was the decision of Muqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite leader, to order his militia leaders to stand down in August 2007, just as the surge troops were arriving. That cease-fire broke down last spring in southern Iraq but was then reinstated, in part at the instigation of Iran and in part because of Sadr’s own political ambitions.
Why conditions became better in Iraq is a crucial issue not only because it may affect the outcome of the U.S. presidential election but, more important, because it indicates the best way out. For McCain and Bush, proving the success of the surge is important because that means the occupation must continue. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, including Barack Obama, that is an unsustainable option.
What we should learn from the history of the surge is that only the prod of withdrawal, rather than indefinite escalation, can persuade the Iraqis to defend themselves as a sovereign state.